1 research outputs found
Algorithms for Manipulating Sequential Allocation
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate
indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking
sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence
picks its most preferred item among all items having not been allocated yet.
This problem is well-known to be not strategyproof, i.e., an agent may get more
utility by reporting an untruthful preference ranking of items. It arises the
problem: how to find the best response of an agent?
It is known that this problem is polynomially solvable for only two agents
and NP-complete for arbitrary number of agents.
The computational complexity of this problem with three agents was left as an
open problem. In this paper, we give a novel algorithm that solves the problem
in polynomial time for each fixed number of agents. We also show that an agent
can always get at least half of its optimal utility by simply using its
truthful preference as the response